Rudyard Kipling loved India, not Indians: Experts

Tribune News Service

Shimla, April 26

Famed writer Rudyard Kipling loved India and knew more about it than most British who ruled here but his antipathy towards Indian nationalist aspirations and prejudice against Indians came up for discussion during a seminar on “Kipling and Indian Nationalism.”

The three-day seminar, which started at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), here today has participants from India as well as abroad. “Kipling’s two books, Kim and Jungle Book, have exceptionally knowing and loveable child-protagonists but this serves to obscure the fact that he thought even highly educated Indians to be incapable and unworthy of self-rule and often showed undisguised contempt for them,” remarked Harish Trivedi, the convener of the seminar.

Trivedi, a former professor of English at the University of Delhi and visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London, said Kipling in the “White man’s burden” exhorted the white races to go on ruling India in perpetuity for its own good.

He cited the article Kipling wrote on the fourth annual session of the Indian National Congress held in Allahabad, titled ‘A Study of the Congress’ and published anonymously in The Pioneer on January 1, 1889. “The report contains some observations on members or sympathisers of the Congress which proved to be slanderous and spiteful,” he remarked.

Another eminent speaker Phillip Mallett, while presenting his paper “Kipling and the Ethics of Adventure”, remarked that his endeavour was to track some questions that emerged in Kipling’s Indian stories of adventurers, loafers, and vagabonds, including the one, “The Man who would be King.” Mallett is Honorary Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, and vice-president of the Hardy Society.

Presenting the paper, “Mind the gap: The translation and use of Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani words in Kipling’s Kim,” Angela Eyre discussed some local literary effects of Kipling’s use of Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani in the creation of an imagined language. She had been teaching Kim on the Masters course for the Open University where she is Associate Lecturer and an Honorary Research Associate.